The effects of stochasticity at the single-cell level and cell size control on the population growth

Jie Lin; Ariel Amir

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arXiv · 1611.07989

The effects of stochasticity at the single-cell level and cell size control on the population growth

Jie Lin·Ariel Amir

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Abstract

Establishing a quantitative connection between the population growth rate and the generation times of single cells is a prerequisite for understanding evolutionary dynamics of microbes. However, existing theories fail to account for the experimentally observed correlations between mother-daughter generation times that are unavoidable when cell size is controlled for - which is essentially always the case. Here, we study population-level growth in the presence of cell size control and corroborate our theory using experimental measurements of single-cell growth rates. We derive a closed formula for the population growth rate and demonstrate that it only depends on the single-cell growth rate variability, not other sources of stochasticity. Our work provides an evolutionary rationale for the narrow growth rate distributions often observed in nature: when single-cell growth rates are less variable but have a fixed mean, the population will exhibit an enhanced population growth rate, as long as the correlations between the mother and daughter cells' growth rates are not too strong.

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Jie Lin, Ariel Amir. 2016-11-23. The effects of stochasticity at the single-cell level and cell size control on the population growth. https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07989

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